Delivering innovative technology and global support, Dot Hill (NASDAQ: HILL)
empowers the OEM community to bring unique storage solutions to market, quickly,
easily and cost-effectively. Offering high performance and industry-leading
uptime, Dot Hill's RAID technology is the foundation for best-in-class storage
solutions offering enterprise-class security, availability and data protection.
The company's products are in use today by the world's leading service and
equipment providers, common carriers, advanced technology and telecommunications
companies as well as government agencies. Dot Hill solutions are certified to
meet rigorous industry standards and military specifications, as well as RoHS
and WEEE international environmental standards. Headquartered in Carlsbad,
Calif., Dot Hill has offices and/or representatives in China, Germany, Japan,
Netherlands, United Kingdom and the United States. For more information, visit
us at http://www.dothill.com

Here's what I said in this column 4 years before the
acquisition announcement.

"Dot Hill's IP and patent portfolio
could be leveraged in the future by SSD companies which use architectural design
tricks which Dot Hill invented for hard drive arrays. Who's going to do that?
Whoever ends up buying the company I guess."

For Dot Hill the transition from
being a vendor of enterprise hard drive based storage to being a pure play SSD
vendor still hasn't happened yet. (And it doesn't look as though that transition
is imminent.)

Instead - Dot Hill has incrementally improved its
technologies in the
auto-tiering market
in recent years with its applications-oriented real-time tieiring.

If
this was 2009
- rather than 2014 - then Dot Hill would undisputedly be the market leader with
this technology offering.

But instead -
today it's just one of more
than a hundred systems companies - competing in the same space with similar
sounding core architectures and software.

And the market space for
caching and tiering SAN
compatible HDD arrays (a category of product under attack from pure play flash
and not likely to survive long) is being ever more finely sliced into more
narrowly defined
segments.

For
even within the market for caching and tiering HDD based SAN storage using
flash - there are at least 3 major different types of solutions which users have
to choose from:-

caching and tiering from the server - for example - as done by
SanDisk.

caching 3rd party already installed SAN HDD storage by inserting a
network caching appliance on the SAN - for example
CacheIO

caching hard drives which appear in the same storage box as the SSDs.

This
is the approach which Dot Hill takes.

And so too - do countless other
vendors - one of whom - Tegile
- was the first vendor (specializing in this category of product) to have
entered the Top SSD
Companies list.

With so many different platforms now available in
the SAN caching / tiering market - the kind of technology which only works in a
single vendor's boxes (and which doesn't have a broad ecosystem of compatible
hardware) requires luck or finely tuned marketing to find the right type of
customers - no matter how clever the thinking and patents behind the raw
algorithms

As
I discussed in previous articles - the ability to design hardware based
RAID controllers will
soon become worthless or obsolete. Many vendors from that market have already
begun their transitions into the SSD market - some via the intermediate route of
SSD ASAPs.

Although
Dot Hill currently offers 3rd party SSDs as options in its storage boxes - those
vanilla offerings are not a route to future business success in the
rackmount SSD market.

Can Dot Hill reengineer itself as a solid state storage company? I
doubt if the company has the right instincts to do that - because doing it
aggressively enough would create too many conflicts with its rotating storage
product lines and also put it into direct competition with many of its existing
oem customers. And anything which reduces the speed of decision making in the
SSD business - almost guarantees failure to be world class.

If the
company sticks to what it does well - in HDD arrays - it will have a future for
many years. But it will be a future in a market which will one day fall off a
cliff.

On the other hand there's always the possibility that Dot
Hill's IP and patent portfolio could be leveraged in the future by SSD
companies which use architectural design tricks which Dot Hill invented for hard
drive arrays. Who's going to do that? Whoever ends up
buying the company I
guess.

Dot Hill acquisition could
reposition Seagate as one of the leading standard platforms in the
highly competitive legacy enterprise hybrid storage appliance market

Editor:- August 18, 2015 - Seagate today
announced
it will acquire Dot
Hill Systems in an all-cash transaction valued at $9.75 per share, or a
total of approximately $694 million.

Editor's comments:- this
is a good strategic move for Seagate which now secures an enterprise market
proven hybrid storage caching and tiering technology which can be used as a
framework for hybrid
appliances and cloud
infrastructure.

The enterprise software stack and patent IP assets
from Dot Hill will enable Seagate to credibly position its SSD caching
technologies as second to none in mid range traditional
legacy
enterprise environments.

Dot Hill's marketing had been foundering
around for a few years and the company was seemingly unable to get the kind of
market attention it would have got if it were offering the same technology as a
startup. Part of the problem was that - as an old time company from the
dotcom era -
which had relied on 3rd party companies oeming its products - Dot Hill had
neglected to develop the same kind of marketing charisma and brand identity as
many of the newer companies which it has been competing with.

As
part of Seagate - Dot Hill 's caching technology could become a viable
alternative platform for integrators who want to compete with newer vendors
Tegile,
Nimble,
NexGen and hybrids from
older vendors like HP and
EMC.

..

Dot Hill was one of the companies whose presentations included such wishful
thinking powerpoints.